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But throwing my day-to-day operations and database to the cloud? I have no need, and I can provide the services to my company far cheaper than any external provider. Last time I priced it out, I could entirely re-do my entire computer infrastructure (Servers, desktops, switches, routers,etc) every 2 years for the extra cost of having it hosted for me. I'd be a fucking retard to do that.

Did you include the cost of administering those systems in your analysis? That's going to be a significant fraction of your budget.

If you're spanking your kids all it means is that you have failed in your role as a parent.

Bullshit. Kids vary widely in the sorts of things that they respond to. One of mine (we'll call him Bob) has always responded well to verbal remonstration and body language (the "look"). The other (Jim) does not. This has been the case for their entire lives. They're getting older now and removal of privileges usually suffices, but when they were little Jim could be punished by removal of toys, removal of privileges, removal of a desired activity and timeouts, but sometimes would just continue right on with the bad behavior. For him, attempting to exercise control over us by trying to make us angry was more important than avoiding punishment. When he really got up a head of steam, he became so single-minded that nothing would stop the behavior except a smack on the butt.

Now, you may be tempted to tell me that I didn't think of all of the alternatives, or that I didn't implement the ones that I tried correctly. The problem is that you don't know what you're talking about because you don't know my kid. I've talked to other parents who have kids like Jim, including some who know Jim, and they also hear this kind of nonsense all of the time. People assume that because they've been successful in using other techniques with their own children, that the success is due to the techniques. What they fail to comprehend is that the child's personality is a huge factor in which techniques actually work. This was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. When Jim was little, I never thought that I'd spank him. We tried everything we could think of, including reading books, articles, blog posts, etc., getting advice from other parents, and experimenting with anything that we could think of. The bottom line was that none of it worked when he really got going.

As a contrast, Bob's bad behavior can usually be interrupted with a sharp word. In serious cases, raising our voices does the trick. Timeouts never fail to work with him, and he rarely takes it far enough to get one. Same parents, same gene pool, very, very different results.

My kid is probably an outlier in this regard, but he's not the only one that I know. If you've been able to find ways to discipline your kids without resorting to spanking, good for you. Don't be arrogant enough, however, to assume that your experience is representative of everyone else's.

This reminds me of a reference in a Shadow Run novel to people who ran around zapping any drones that they saw with the equivalent of a supercharged taser. This was in the context of a world where many such drones were seen daily, used by law enforcement, private companies, etc. If such usage becomes common in reality, might a section of the tin-foil hat crowd or "American Militia" movement behave similarly?

It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.

You can use the Session Manager add-on to do this by saving groups of tabs as named sessions. If you need multiple sets open at once, you can put each session into a separate window.

While the advantages you listed are true, traffic circles (what we call "roundabouts" here in the D.C. area) have cons as well.

We have quite a few of them in the District. I used to drive through Washington Circle (Google Map) every day on my way to work. They work well for areas with moderate traffic or where one of the streets has heavy traffic and the other(s) only light traffic. Unfortunately, that does not describe the traffic in the D.C. area, including Montgomery County. We have the second worst traffic in the country, after Los Angeles. We have traffic lights on some entry ramps for our highways to regulate entry so that the four and six lane highways don't get backed up as much. That's how bad it is.

Also, circles require more room than intersections. A lot of our major roads around here have three or four lanes going in each direction. A three or four lane circle would take up quite a bit of space and becomes more daunting to navigate.

Are circles better than unsynchronized traffic lights during a D.C. rush hour? Possibly. Are they better than synchronized traffic lights the other 360 days a year? I doubt it.

It was rated as funny because the g.p. used an unexpected twist to point out a fact that is often overlooked in the discussion of the results of slavery in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. That twist registers in the human brain as humor.

You're certainly entitled to resent and be angered by the treatment that your ancestors suffered as a result of slavery and that you and your family have suffered as a result of racism. IMO slavery may be the worst crime that humans have ever dreamed up to commit on one another.

Nonetheless, the point that the descendants of slaves living in Europe, the U.S. and Canada may be better off in terms of standard of living, health care and left expectancy isn't invalid. It's arguable (the life expectancy for African American men is appalling, for example) and in no way justifies the barbarity of slavery or the way that the U.S. has treated their descendants since[1], but it shouldn't be dismissed without consideration in an argument about reparations; one of the most frequent justifications for paying reparations now is the current social-economic status of the descendants of slaves relative to the rest of the population. If that's fair game, why not the g.p.'s point?

[1] I don't know enough about the issues in Canada or Europe to comment.

>When I write NOT NULL in a column, it doesn't necessarily mean I want to enforce that I MUST supply a value during any INSERT (and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc). Therefore I always supply a DEFAULT value, that the DB can safely insert in that column, IF I haven't specified anything different during the INSERT.

That's lovely, but it's not a solution that covers all cases and I damned well don't want the RDBMS assuming that it does. As others have pointed out, there are cases where one might require a NOT NULL column with no default value. If I want a column to have a default value, I'll supply one. If I don't, it shouldn't go behind my back and add one like some sort of damned MS autocorrection feature.

They must be doing something right in Europe though because every country I've checked on the CIA's factbook has a higher life expectancy for both men and women and a lower rate of infant mortality than the US.

Why do you think that is solely due to medical care? There are a number of other factors, such as education, violence and immigration[1] that might also factor in.

[1] People to immigrate later in life from countries with poor medical care might skew the numbers somewhat by dying earlier as a result of that poor medical care, regardless of the care available to them in their new country of residence. No, I don't have any numbers; I'm speculating. It's still a plausible alternative to the parent's conclusion.